Our theater of seasons: Wrote AUDREY FOXLEY: Ã¢â‚¬Å“I love seeing the photos of all kinds in the Bulletin Board. IÃ¢â‚¬â„¢ve pulled this one out from April 2008. My neighbor made this snow Easter Bunny, and I thought your readers would like it too. Thanks.Ã¢â‚¬?

Writes Al B of Hartland: “I stopped at the eyeglasses place to have my cheaters adjusted. They were irritating my nose, chewing into the flesh on both sides.

“I explained my problem to the nice person working there.

“She thought she’d be able to solve my predicament posthaste.

“She fussed with them some before asking: ‘Is this the same head you had when you purchased the glasses?’ ”

The Permanent Paternal Record

Tim Torkildson: “The Labor Department is expanding the list of salaried workers who are eligible for overtime. Sounds OK by me. I grew up in a household where my dad’s income was all we had to live on. That may sound like it was a little desperate, but the fact of the matter is that Dad worked as a salaried bartender and was privy to a constant stream of generous (not to say unusual) tips from his thirsty patrons. Silver half-dollars were the normal coin of the realm for tipping by the high rollers who came in for a shot and a beer, with their floozies on their arm (as my mother would sniff disapprovingly; I thought a floozy was some kind of pet monkey, from the way Mom described them, until I was 14).

“He was a hefty man, who rolled down the street in the manner of a beach ball with legs. The pockets of my dad’s slacks (waistband: 60 inches plus) could hold an exceptional amount of silver half-dollars. Coming home late at night, he would drape his pants over a dining-room chair before going up to bed. My sister and I would often come downstairs early the next morning to each jump in a leg of his pants and walk around the house pretending to be Siamese twins. The silver Franklins and Kennedys were, in our eyes, pirate treasure that belonged to whoever found them first — finders keepers, losers weepers, matey! We rifled his pockets without compunction, using the half-dollars to strike medallions in our Play-Doh or to shy at the bobble-headed pigeons that kaffeeklatsched on the roof of our front porch.

“This, of course, was not an approved course of action for our mother, who remembered the Depression-era boarding houses she endured all too well. Shaking us out of Dad’s gabardine treasure trove and telling us to scoot, she efficiently collected the remaining loot and stored it in a racist ceramic cookie jar; the jar was molded to resemble a fat, black mammy, complete with red bandana around her china head and a carefree grin showing off her oversized pearly whites. That money was used to pay the milkman, the insurance man (he came calling once a month to collect on the small insurance policies both my parents carried), the paperboy, and to supplement the mortgage payment. Dad did not seem to notice the lack of ballast when he put his trousers back on in the morning; he would just bawl for a cup of coffee, black as sin, to settle his nerves, which apparently took a beating each night at work from the roistering volume of his customers.

“Aside from the silver, I remember other tips he brought back home more fondly — such as the box of Baby Ruth candy bars some traveling salesman gave my dad one night, which he generously shared with us children the next morning for breakfast. It sure beat that library paste laughingly called Cream of Wheat that Mom kept trying to palm off on us. When she discovered what Dad had fed us while she was removing her cold cream that morning, there were high words bandied between them, at a pitch and volume calculated to set the neighbors’ ears tingling.

“More welcome to my mother were the hams and poultry that Dad routinely brought back, left by sozzled shoppers who had stopped in for a quick one on their way home from the grocery store.

“One Sunday afternoon, when Dad came home for Sunday dinner before attending his Sabbath pinochle game at the Pine Tavern, he remained outside by the car for quite a long time, struggling with something in the trunk. Dying of curiosity, I abandoned the newspaper funny pages to investigate. Dad had a LIVE turkey by its legs, which were trussed up with twine. The bird was attempting to kill my father by beating him to death with its wings. Bestowing arcane biological titles on the struggling animal, Dad finally managed to take it into the back yard and lock it in the garage, where it gobbled ferociously. Mom, of course, had watched the entire spectacle, first from the living-room window and then from the kitchen window. She did not offer to help her mate in any way, shape or form, but asked crossly when he came in the back door, brushing pin feathers off his shirt, what the Sam Hill she was supposed to do with a LIVE turkey.

” ‘A farmer gave it to me to pay his bar tab,’ said Dad. ‘I’ll have Pickle Joe come by to kill it and pluck it for ya.’

“More high words. Pickle Joe was an undesirable, a permanent tenant at the grog shop where dad plied his trade, and not to be trusted around innocent children or defenseless women. But the whole argument became moot a moment later, when the turkey found that the garage’s one window was wide open; the fowl’s triumphant flight to freedom, having pecked off its twine shackles, was marked by a jubilant ululation that resounded through the somnolent neighborhood like the chuckle of a banshee.

“There were many other tips that Dad brought home over the years. It’s hard to place a monetary value on some of them: raffle tickets, hand-painted neckties, a Charley Weaver doll that puffed smoke out of its ears, tins of Swedish snus, and, my personal favorite, a 1955 book edition of ‘Ripley’s Believe It or Not.’ I read that book until it became dog-eared and the pages started falling out, devouring tidbits about people who spontaneously combusted and Burmen who put brass rings around their women’s necks until they looked like giraffes.

“For some reason, a lot of drinkers gave my dad a rabbit’s foot as a tip. He kept a drawer full of them at work, handing them out brusquely whenever someone started crying in their beer. He gave me dozens of them over the years, which probably explains why I was not on the Titanic when it went down or on the Hindenburg when it crashed in flames. That, and the fact I hadn’t been born yet….”

Today’s helpful hint

Auntie Omi: “My niece was looking for a specific cable and had a huge nest of black cords to untangle that had managed to intertwine. (Had they been secretly mating in the storage container?) As she extracted them one by one, she had an empty toilet-paper cardboard roll to put each coiled one into, to keep it separate.

“Cardboard condoms for cords — great idea!”

Out of the mouths of babes

Mrs. Romance: “It had to happen. The Little Romance grew up, married, and now there is a Baby Romance, 2 years old already.

“Baby Romance and I were out in the driveway with the chalk, and he was reciting his colors. ‘Green’; yep. ‘Red’; well, actually it was orange but it had red stripes, so, whatever. Then he picked up the blue chalk and started coloring my varicose veins ‘Blue’; OK, sure. While he was in that neighborhood, he moved over to the other leg, which had a healing bruise: ‘Yellow.’ Looks like Gramma is the new color chart.”

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